Flash

I’ve been doing a bit of work on Flash recently, and it’s been an interesting ride so far.

I can’t really describe the project, but it wasn’t something too complicated. A ‘Flash guy’ could have finished it in a couple of days, I took much longer. I could wing-it through though, because in the end ActionScript is just Javascript dressed-up.

Here’s something I didn’t know: the two commonly used versions of ActionScript (2.0 and 3.0) are radically different. I like AS3, but it feels too heavy. I had to do some of my work initially in AS2. Imagine my surprise that a block of code that was running perfectly in one file didn’t do anything at all in another… AS3 breaks backward-compatibility in a lot of places, which I didn’t know.

I don’t really like the ‘graphics’ part of Flash. Some of the GUI work I did was atrocious. But I think that vector graphics are really cool, so that’s something I want to try and learn. Maybe I’ll install Inkscape and play a bit…

I guess that questions about openness of the platform are the only things holding me back from really learning Flash/Flex/etc. Will read-up a bit on that topic when I get the time.